Still Dreaming Big, My New Outdoor Kitchen

 When we bought our cottage and acre of land, we had big plans for what we were going to do with it. Of course Hurricane Hugo set us back almost 6 years in the implementation of our hopes and dreams, as well as 17 years of homeschooling that took priority. But we kept dreaming and honing our plans, keeping the dream alive and making steps towards our goals as time and money allowed.

  One thing we consistently hoped and planned for was a greenhouse. That saga will be told another day, but the short of it is after almost 30 years of hoping and planning, we now have a mostly finished greenhouse, that is fully employed! 

 The focus of today's post is our outdoor kitchen. In my mind's eye I visualized a fully equipped indoor style kitchen, outdoors. Well, time and experience are good teachers, while we were waiting for the culmination of this dream, we learned some things along the way that changed our plans. The perfect siting for our outdoor kitchen was always a question, but since other projects took shape before the kitchen, we were presented with the perfect location, one we would not have visualized it we had gotten the "Summer Kitchen" early on. The deck on the back of our house started out being the access point for an 24 foot above ground pool that would keep our kids and their friends at our house and occupied during the summers. When the kids grew up and left home, the pool was donated to another family and the decking was closed in with a railing. We were planning to open an AirBnB at that time, in what used to be the master bedroom. There was an outside access to the MBR, so we put a gazebo on that side of the deck, so guests could sit outside and enjoy the views of the gardens. There are stairs on the deck that go from the Gazebo to the Butterfly Garden that was planted when the pool was removed. Nestled between the deck corner and the Butterfly garden is a 10x12 foot deck where our hot tub was during the pool days. The hot tub deck turned out to be the perfect spot for the Summer Kitchen! 

   The deck needed new floor boards and some steps for safe footing getting from the deck to the laundry garden, but other than that, the structure needed very little alteration. We purchased a metal roofed Gazebo with curtains, lights and a ceiling fan from Lowe's. Da and I put it together ourselves and in just one weekend we had the structure up and ready for use! Over the next few weeks, Da would get a potable water source plumbed in and a repurposed sink in place. It has cold water only, but that is no biggie. If I want hot water, I just heat it on the stove. 

Sink with view of the Butterfly Garden

Cleaning Leeks after harvesting

While Da was working on the plumbing, I was researching what kind of stove I wanted in my Summer Kitchen. Some experiences we had in 2015, helped me to make a better decision about what kind of stove to plan for in this situation, than I otherwise would have made. Long story short, in 2015 we were forced to live outside for almost 3 months while we had mold remediation done and a complete kitchen renovation undertaken. See Life at Heart's Ease Cottage, Living Outside for more details on that story. After living outside for 3 months with my kitchen under a canopy on the back deck, it became apparant that there is more dirt in the air than one could imagine, and it settles on EVERYTHING! Keeping an outdoor kitchen clean is quite a task. So, employing the vintage 1930's Roper stove I bought for this kitchen years ago was a "no go". It would have looked so cool out there, but it just wasn't practical. Bummer... But! No worries, the Roper stove has a place inside and is used to great advantage as a place to store kitchen ware, linens and to house my dehydrator and Instant Pot, all while fitting into the asthetic of our 1940's Cottage! So, the practical side of my personality overode the creative side (momentarily anyway...) and decided for the Summer Kitchen, that a more practical choice would be a stove that is made for use outdoors! Duh... 

There were very specific requirements that had to be met for pressure canning, which was one of the main things I wanted to be able to do outside. The cooking surface needs to be strong enough to hold my heavy All American Canner, jars full of food and water for processing. The heat source had to be consistent and unperturbed by breezes blowing through the kitchen. Both of these requirement knock a regular Coleman style cook stove out of the running. It wasn't big enough to hold the canner and had no reliability when it came to heat regulation. Fortunately, I found just what I needed for pressure canning as well as water bath canning and just regular bulk cooking. The Camp Chef Explorer!

 This outdoor stove is very well made, with a heavy guage metal grate cooking surface and two 30,000 BTU burners. It has a very effective windscreen that even in windy conditions protects the flame from variation in temperature. A BBQ grill sized Propane tank is the fuel source which can easily be stored under the Stove when not in use and when use, can sit safely away from the flames. The stove breaks down and can be stored in a handy dandy travel case, but I intend for it to stay right where it is, so I got a weather cover for it that keeps the whole stove protected from the elements. The Summer Kitchen has a hard roof and ample overhang, but blowing rain still gets things wet in a good thunderstorm, so having the stove covered when not in use is a must.

  At the present, I have a small, portable camp table in the kitchen as a work surface and I am ferrying my utensil, pots and jars out to the kitchen from inside. This is temporary. I fully intend to have a cabinet/countertop and storage area for equipment permanently in the Summer Kitchen. I am just using it for awhile as is, to get some clarity about what works best in an outdoor area. I know that a regular cabinet with shelves and drawers won't work. There is too much moisture and dirt for that. I think The surface will be butcher block counter top. We have inheirited a 1.5 inch thick, 6 ft. long butcher block top from Da's family home that will be the countertop, but the cabinet itself will be made to stand up to the elements, with open shelves for storing tools, etc in snap top totes to keep things inside clean and dry. I am still working on a design. but hope to have one nailed down by the fall. 

Until we get the final design figured out the Summer Kitchen is still completely functional and in use. I feel so happy to be out there canning or cooking away, while watching the butterflies and birds flitting around in the Butterfly Garden and listening to the trickle of water from the Bunny Fountain situated just feet away from where I am cooking. Dreaming is the first step to bringing something into real life. One thing I have learned from all the adventures at Heart's Ease Cottage, is that dreams don't ever have to die, but sometimes they take a long time to come to pass and they are never what you thought they would be! I am glad we had to plan, work and wait, so that at the right moment in our lives, things would coalesce and be just what we need!

I am so happy you came to visit and hope you will drop by again soon! Due to several years of illness, There were no new posts for a long time, but there is a huge amount of content in past posts that is as relevant today as it was when it was posted. Please look back through the archives for lots more content and now that my health is looking up, I am hoping for much more content to be produced in the future!

Howdy's and comments are always welcome! It helps me feel like I am not just talking to myself ;)

Embracing The Mundane

 

When our first child was born my husband and I decided that I should leave my job and stay at home with our son. I have never regretted that decision, but it wasn't a cakewalk. There was a transition period. A time where I felt like I was losing myself. Buried in stacks of diapers to wash by hand, (rolling brown outs in the Philippines made hand washing necessary at times), the endless cycles of wash, feed, burp, change, repeat, made me feel like my brains were turning to Pablum. But over time, probably as a coping mechanism, I learned to find ways to enjoy the necessary routines. 

I learned to "experience" the tasks at hand and tried to enjoy them (at least some of them). I began to be actively aware of each step in a task. I listened to the sound of running water, smelled the scent of the soap,  squished around in the pan of soapy water like I did as a child, before adding the less pleasant dirty diapers. Once cleaned and rinsed the methodical rhythm of of hanging clean cotton Nappies in the Philipino sunshine allowed my mind to wander. I would think creative thoughts or just enjoy the scent of frangipani flowers on the breeze.

Over the years I have honed the art of "Embracing the Mundane". Homeschooling two boys who were 7 years apart meant lots of planning, preparation, and patience. Designing cirriculum that would address the educational needs of a kindergardener and a pre-teen challenged me creatively and intellectually, but there was a whole lot of brain burning repetition it the application of my plans. So, sometimes when we were going to be doing unpopular or "boring" stuff ( quoting the kids), I would pack a simple picnic lunch, break out the fishing poles, dig some worms from the compost bin and head to a nearby lake. Here on the lake bank we would memorize multiplication tables,  conjugate verbs in Latin, and practice reading while drowning worms. With the bobber gently rolling over the wake and the breeze rustling through the lake shore reeds, verb conjugation and multiplication tables seemed far less onerous. But of course, if something hit the line, all  scholarly endeavors were momentarily abandoned. The catch was reeled in, observed, released and celebrated before returning to the task at hand. 

The kids and I were all seeing how to cope with the mundane. Learning to make simple changes to facilitate getting something done rather than putting it off, adding a little fun to an undesirable task, or looking forward to a little treat after finishing something challenging were tools that could be employed for a lifetime. It helped us to have successes instead of butting heads, shedding tears or secretly going and screaming into a pillow (...me...).

I have learned that breaking a task I am tempted to put off into bite sized pieces,  means that I am moving forward however incrementally. Every step taken leads towards a finished task. Learning to find a way to enjoy each of the steps makes the whole business more pleasant. Rather than saying to myself, "I don't have time to do this", I ask myself "what part if this can I do in 5-15 minutes"? For example weeding; with as many gardens as we have here at Heart's Ease Cottage, weeding can be quite daunting if looked at as a whole. But if I ask myself "what can I accomplish while I am waiting for a newly mopped floor to dry?", I can go chip away at my weeding task for 15  minutes and enjoy the view of a freshly weeded bed. Acknowledging and enjoying the little successes in a day empowers me to have more of both successes and enjoyment of them!

 At the end of May I need to prune, deadhead and feed my perennial borders so they will continue to bloom. I love my gardens but I didn't always love the actual gardening part of gardens.  That is, until I started establishing rituals that made these necessary but less than desirable tasks more pleasant. I dress in something cheerful, take a pretty basket out for snipping some blooms for arranging later, and use a pair of pruning shears that make a pleasant sound as they open and close (this periodically requires a trip to the garden center to stand there opening and closing shears until I find one that makes the "right" sound).  Once in the garden, I make an effort to remain aware of the pleasant surroundings, the bumbles busy pollinating the flowers around me, the methodical snipping sound of my shears and the feel of the soil against my bare feet. Being mindful of and enjoying the simple things going on around me turns a boring task into a pleasure.

With each passing year I find myself more and more appreciative and content with doing the day to day things of life. I don't need to be doing something special to enjoy myself. I have learned to find pleasure in most anything I have to do. Rouine, order and a plan,
spiced up with a little fun makes repetitve day to day tasks more achievable and the saisfaction it brings to see progress made, spurs me on to tackle the next task that needs doing!